BOOKS OF THE TIMES; A Rich Boy's Poor Childhood

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Published: May 27, 2005

Oh the Glory of It All
By Sean Wilsey
482 pages. The Penguin Press. $25.95.

''In the beginning we were happy. And we were always excessive. So in the beginning we were happy to excess.''

So begins Sean Wilsey's sad-funny-extravagant memoir about growing up in San Francisco in the 1970's and 80's.

It's a sprawling kitchen sink of a memoir, stuffed to the gills with seemingly everything the author can remember about his youth and in dire need of some industrial-strength editing, but at the same time, an epic performance: by turns heartfelt, absurd, self-indulgent, self-abasing, silly and genuinely moving. A memoir that manages to encompass riffs about the joys of skateboarding, the woes of high society, the miseries of boarding school and the perils of new money and new age therapies with equal aplomb, a memoir that can make the reader remember -- no, re-experience -- what it was like to be a wretched child and even more wretched teenager with ridiculous, Proustian ease.

It's a book as hip and intermittently tender as Dave Eggers's ''Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,'' as gripping and overstuffed as David Foster Wallace's ''Infinite Jest.''

Mr. Wilsey's parents emerge from this book as larger-than-life figures: twin colossi of narcissism and self-invention, preeningly fond of grand entrances and fonder still of grand, self-dramatizing gestures.

His swaggering father, Al Wilsey, who parlayed the family butter and egg business into a real estate fortune, likes to take Sean up in the family helicopter -- to get hotcakes at a restaurant called the Nut Tree or to play video games at an amusement center 40 miles away. He explains sex to his 9-year-old son by buying him a copy of Playboy magazine, and is fond of saying things like, ''If I lose everything, I can always drive a truck.''

His beautiful mother, Pat Montandon, who grew up poor in Texas and Oklahoma, moved to California, married and divorced, got a job at Joseph Magnin's, met Frank Sinatra, dyed her hair blonde, married and divorced again, became known for giving flamboyant theme parties (a mod party, an astrology party, a come-as-your-favorite celebrity party), married and divorced a third time, became a television hostess and married Al Wilsey.

The Wilseys become famous for the parties they gave at their glittering San Francisco apartment overlooking the bay, parties attended by the likes of Alex Haley, Joan Baez, Shirley Temple, Werner Erhard and the Black Panthers. Pat Wilsey is declared ''the West Coast's No.1 hostess'' by Esquire magazine. The San Francisco Examiner hires her to write a society column. And Armistead Maupin eventually turns her into a thinly disguised character in his best-selling ''Tales of the City.''

After ''10 years without once fighting,'' their son recalls, the marriage spectacularly unravels -- played out in the pages of the local papers and The National Enquirer. His mother's monthly expenses (and this was the early 1980's) are reported as follows: ''$2,500 a month on travel ($4,800 according to one paper); the same on clothes; $50 for firewood; $300 in symphony and opera tickets; another $50 for glasses (she was always losing them); $500 for an allergist; $500 for flowers (casual, everyday flowers -- there was a whole separate 'entertaining' figure).''

In the wake of the divorce and Al Wilsey's subsequent marriage to her former best friend, Dede Traina, Pat Wilsey settles upon a new vocation: she is going to save the world by organizing children's peace rallies. She organizes trips to visit the pope, trips to the Soviet Union, trips to India and the Middle East. She gives a Dior nightgown to a starving child in an Ethiopian famine camp, and auctions her clothes and jewelry in the ballroom of the Fairmont hotel to raise money. She dreams of winning the Nobel Peace Prize: ''Somebody has to win,'' she tells her son, ''why not me?''

It never seems to occur to either of the parents that Sean is an 11-year-old child caught in the crossfire of their divorce. Or that their narcissistic theatrics will have a palpable emotional fallout.

His mother tries to talk him into committing suicide with her. She tells him (falsely) that she has cancer and that she is going to be dead by Christmas. She tells him that she is going to drive her car through his father's new house and kill him and Dede and herself.

As for Al Wilsey, he pits Sean against Dede's two sons and continually puts him down: ''I tried to be funny -- my one salvation at school,'' the author remembers. ''He refused to laugh at my jokes, though he frequently laughed at things I could not help. Like my walk, which was 'too bouncy' and cracked him up, until it made him angry, and then he tried to train me out of it.''

Suffocated by his mother's neediness and undercut by his father's impossible demands, Sean comes to think of himself as ''THE ENEMY OF EMOTIONS.'' He figures that emotions have made a mess of his life and that he will strive ''to resist emotions, to be sarcastic'' -- ''which is hard to do,'' he adds, ''when you are filled with emotion.''